The IRA peacemaker

THERE were two Martin McGuinnesses: the man of violence and the peacemaker of the past two decades. But the former IRA man, who died last night, could only have been as effective as he was as a peacemaker because he was an IRA commander — in selling the Good Friday Agreement to the IRA he had the credibility of being one of them. Indeed, it was he, rather than Gerry Adams, who can take the greater credit for its acceptance on his own side, from which a generation in Northern Ireland has benefited.

One lesson he offers, then, is that it sometimes takes extremists, rather than moderates, to make peace. That plainly is morally difficult for many people to accept; it seems to reward extremism at the expense of moderation. Yet, as Tony Blair said, it was precisely the qualities that made him a formidable enemy of the British state that made him equally formidable as a peacemaker.

But this is not the only lesson of his life. He was, he said, made a Republican by the sectarian state in which he grew up. Derry/Londonderry then was a very different place than now; he was first radicalised by the violent suppression by the police, then Protestant-dominated, of a civil rights protest in which his father took part. The Northern Ireland of the time made dissidents, many, but by no means all of them violent.

Of course victims of terrorism in Northern Ireland, notably Norman Tebbit, whose wife was gravely injured in the Brighton bombing, will find it hard or impossible to forgive Mr McGuinness for the actions of the IRA but there is no gainsaying the extraordinary journey that he, and his loyalist counterparts, took in making a break with the past. The relationship between Mr McGuinness and the late Ian

Paisley was genuinely extraordinary. Their friendship told its own story: if they could be reconciled, then so could any irreconcilables. It is not to diminish Mr McGuinness’s sins to say that he did great things in making peace. And that’s a blessing.